hyakvnc

Create and manage VNC Slurm jobs on UW HYAK Klone cluster.

hyakvnc allocates resources then starts a VNC session within an Apptainer environment.

Get started

Prerequisites

Before running hyakvnc, you'll need the following:

• SSH client
• VNC client
• HYAK Klone access with compute resources
• VNC Apptainer with a desktop environment and miscellaneous tools/libraries
• xstartup script used to launch a desktop environment

Building

Update pip:

python3 -m pip install --upgrade --user pip

Clone repo and build package:

cd hyakvnc
python3 -m pip install --user .

If successful, then hyakvnc should be installed to ~/.local/bin/.

Creating a VNC session

1. Start a VNC session with the create command followed by arguments to specify the Slurm account and partition, compute resource needs, reservation time, and paths to a VNC apptainer and xstartup script.

# example: Starting VNC session on `ece` compute resources for 5 hours on a
# node with 16 cores and 32GB of memory
hyakvnc create -A ece -p compute-hugemem \
    -t 5 -c 16 --mem 32G \
    --container /path/to/container.sif \
    --xstartup /path/to/xstartup

2. If successful, hyakvnc should print a unique port forward command:

...
=====================
Run the following in a new terminal window:
        ssh -N -f -L 5901:127.0.0.1:5901 hansem7@klone.hyak.uw.edu
then connect to VNC session at localhost:5901
=====================

Copy this port forward command for the following step.

3. Set up port forward between your computer and HYAK login node. On your machine, in a new terminal window, run the the copied command.

# Following the example, run:
ssh -N -f -L 5901:127.0.0.1:5901 hansem7@klone.hyak.uw.edu

4. Connect to VNC session at instructed address (in example: localhost:5901)

5. To close VNC session, run the following

hyakvnc kill-all

License

hyakvnc is licensed under MIT License.